Over the past year I've been reading a lot of opinions on the new init technology, systemd. Some people think systemd is wonderful, the bee's knees. Others claim that systemd is broken by design. Some see systemd as a unifying force, a way to unite the majority of the Linux distributions. Others see systemd as a growing blob that is slowly becoming an overly large portion of the operating system. One thing that has surprised me a little is just how much people care about systemd, whether their opinion of the technology is good or bad. People in favour faithfully (and sometimes falsely) make wonderful claims about what systemd is and what it can supposedly do. Opponents claim systemd will divide the Linux community and drive many technical users to other operating systems. There is a lot of hype and surprisingly few people presenting facts.

People tend to forget that open source is not democracy but rather a meritocracy ("those who do, get to make the decisions")

I think it's neither a democracy nor a meritocracy. It's software. The people who do are dependent on other people who do. When they move X11 to Wayland for instance they break the work of many people. It's not easy to take the right decision as a community of packagers like Debian but that's what they do. Debian is the aggregation of all the work of all the other upstream projects into a coherent final product at the hand of the user. They are the ones who judge and select the work of others and Debian is actually structured as a democracy.